Norwich Recreation's big event of the year. Much fun had by all -- as always. Great crowd, great day. Click here for more images.

My otherwise pretty progressive (independent) local station here in VT, The Point, runs the standard two minute on-the-hour "news" with a few local tid-bits, some national news and not much else. It was quite striking, then, to hear this morning a summary of events in the Twin Cities (see below) along the lines of: "250 violent protesters were arrested at the RNC convention after fires were set." That was it -- and, thus, the operatives running the over-the-top security operation appear to have accomplished exactly what they were after: not a word about police state conditions, "pre-emptive arrests" or raids on vegan protest groups after spying on them for months; and nothing about excessive force used while arresting representatives of the media or participants in lawful demonstrations -- instead, the narrative has effectively been boiled down to "convention rioters arrested." Confirmation that anyone who dares to protest is clearly a dirty fucking hippie and only gets what he or she deserves.

What a huge PR victory for those who wield power, and what a massive defeat for the 1st amendment -- not only has freedom of speech effectively been canceled in the Twin Cities, but coverage of that fact in the mainstream media has been silenced as well. Tim Karr makes the same point at HuffPo.

Given that the first day of the convention was largely reduced to a farce, it would perhaps not have seemed unreasonable for a few of the timid mainstream media representatives to go find a story elsewhere (right outside the spin room); instead, it devolved into Palin-palooza and the casting of the occasional glance towards the Gulf (where the "real" action appeared to be happening).

(Image from indymedia.org). 

-- And nobody in the mainstream media appear to give a shit about it. Is it just assumed that we're all okay with this? What, we're safer when everyone who's *not* wearing a uniform is arrested? I'm sorry, but they're targeting vegans as if they were a national threat... Ooh, tofu. Scary. 

All day NPR has been doing nothing but vapid GOP fluffing ("so, Juan Williams, just how amazing is Governor Palin?") interspersed with lame updates on Hurricane Gustav; not a single word about peaceful protesters (remember, that 1st amendment thingie?) being spied on (4th amendment) and arrested without any cause.

Heck, they even arrested Amy Goodman -- that's completely ridiculous, and hopefully will end up pissing off the intrepid journalist enough to break some major story that will embarras everyone in the St. Paul establishment. Who'd have thunk that Minnesota could harbor such complete assholes like their chief of police -- oh, and the mayor?

I mean, it's not like we didn't know that Sears Sucks Big Time ... But since the only solution to their last round of suckage was for us to buy another of their flawed products, I suppose it was inevitable that teh suck would come back to haunt us yet again. So here we are, our barely three year old Kenmore fridge/freezer has died, and the soonest Sears could be bothered to come out and examine why their semi-disposable $1000+ appliance is on the fritz was 10 days after it died. I'm half-tempted to mail them a bag of formerly frozen shrimp as a token of my gratitude...

But is it lonely out here in the land of Sears Suckers? Hardly. I mean, there's an entire nation of ex-Sears customers out there with a story to tell. I want to highlight Mallika's intentblog entry here, if nothing else but for the cool fact that she comes up top of the list on a Google search for "sears sucks." Nice work, Malikka, and your rant thread is still active after almost two years... I hope your dish washer works now.

Seriously, just how sucky do you have to be as a company before you realize that it's costing you business big time? Oh, wait, Sears already did the belly-up thing and ended up at a shotgun wedding with K-Mart. Now they're a happy couple: Mr. & Mrs. Shitty-Crap. Your One-stop shop for all things that suck.